Sublime

Much more important, his philosophy of railroading—with its emphasis on infrastructure and the primacy of freight—would live on, not only in these lines but in most others as well.

Jim Hill worked incessantly at improving every aspect of the railroad’s structure and operation. He traveled back and forth along the line in his business car, looking for dips and bumps and spying out curves that could be straightened and grades that could be lessened. More than any other railroad leader of the day, he had an engineer’s passion fo

Hill spent hours determining where best to invest—and when—in steel trestles to replace wooden ones and masonry culverts to replace earlier wooden ones. He stopped often to talk to the gangs of track layers and the graders carving at the earth with their horse-drawn blades. Soon, he had all locomotives using coal for fuel and then set about acquiri

The SP&S proved to be the superb line that Jim Hill had promised; in fact, it was the best road he had ever built.

Few regional railroads could match it either for solidity of capitalization and infrastructure or for excellence of management.

on February 21, 1804, in the presence of Homfray, Crawshay, and a government engineer who had come to observe. Trevithick wrote to a friend the next day, “We carried ten tons of iron in five wagons, and seventy men riding on them the whole of the journey … The gentleman that bet 500 guineas against it rode the whole of the journey with us, and is s

The Stockton and Darlington railway in northeast England, which opened in September 1825, was the first public railway to make use of steam traction.

he was one of the first to comprehend that the day of independent regional roads was coming to an end, that only transcontinental systems offering low through-rates would survive as independent systems. Regional roads, even prosperous ones like the Manitoba, would be swallowed up by the transregional railroads.